Today at the hawker centre, there was a little girl who drew my portrait! I’m so impressed! She captured my bun with hairclips in it, she captured my bangs and the locks of hair I have in the front, framing my face. She captured my striped T-shirt and the face mask I had on my wrist. She captured the peace sign I made in the picture we had just taken. She even drew a cat for me! How did she know I loved cats‽
I've been seeing so many different cats, that I keep getting the "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories" song by Emperor X stuck in my head:
In case you don't know the story: this song was commissioned by the 99 Percent Invisible podcast for their episode on how to warn people in the far future to stay away from nuclear waste deposits.
The idea is that no civilisation existed for as long as the time that radioactive waste remains dangerous. Hence, we need ways to warn people that are robust for lost of language, symbols, etc.
One idea was to breed cats that light up in the presence of radiation, and to then create a folk song about the importance of keeping cats, and the importance of leaving (with the cat) when the cat changes colour.
I finally did it: I went to the top of MBS like a proper tourist.
I spent so many good times at GBTB.
Especially at the beginning, when I was still staying at hotels in SG's Central area, I spent many a first date strolling through the gardens or around Marina Bay at night.
My colleague and I went flying his kite on Marina Barrage. When my parents visited, they posed for pics in front of MBS and we saw a drone show in the gardens.
My best friend and I went to the flower dome together, and to the GBTB Christmas Market.
The supergrove trees are a popular location for visiting geocachers to host their Singapore events, so I've experienced the Garden Rhapsody many times, also at special occasions like LNY.
One of the things I'm going to miss most is all the lush green here in SG. It's beautiful and always cheers me up. I'm sad every time a tree gets taken down by a thunderstorm. I had an amazing view of all that green from the top of MBS.
Question: in your professional life, I'm assuming that you have some people in mind who you respect and admire, and whose behaviours you try to emulate?
I'm curious if those are mostly fellow academics, or mostly people outside of academia, or a pretty even mix? Does the set of people whose behaviours you try to emulate vary much over time?
Why can't just one single good work thing happen to me without a guy finding it necessary to remind me that my purpose in life is to be fucked by men, and that I'm not even good enough for that?
Like... just why?
Something positive happened and now I feel like shit.
@christianp I think so! I started before I even had a phone that supported the app, but if you start with an app, I think it's pretty intuitive.
The official geocaching.com app is probably the easiest to start with. There are multiple geocaching circles. I like geocaching.com because they have rather strict rules about getting permission to place the geocache and about not damaging nature etc. You can get a free account, but you will have access to fewer caches and less functionality in the app than with a paid premium account. (Just make sure to pick a nice username. If you get active in the community, you will primarily be known by your geocaching username, something that I found out too late...)
However: the free account should give you access to the most basic caches, which are usually beginner-friendly. Just start with the "traditional" cache (the green symbol in the app), and don't go beyond difficulty rating 2/5 (and probably also not beyond terrain rating 2/5) for the first 10 or so caches that you search for.
Most caches provide a hint, which is probably a good idea to check out. It might also help to check out the logs of previous finders, because that might give you a hint if something is wrong with the cache.
You can also google "geocaching $PlaceWhereYouLive" to see if there is a local community that you can ask for help. I found a Telegram group in Singapore when I just moved there, and people regularly ask for help and hints, and get responses very quickly.
Once you find the cache, make sure to hide it again, and to write a friendly and detailed message in your log about your experience. The cache owner is a volunteer, after all.
Today is my first "doctoral birthday": one year ago today I defended my dissertation and became a doctor. My parents remembered and congratulated me this morning 😭 🥰
Last week, I presented the work I did with prof. Kuldeep Meel and prof. Arunabha Sen at IJCAI 2023.
We showed the benefits of reducing a problem to a computationally harder problem (yes, you read that right!), by demonstrating how it allows us to solve much larger problem instances.
It was so much fun to finally share this work with so many fantastic researchers at IJCAI! Thank you to all organisers for making this conference possible. I'm also super grateful to the reviewers who gave us great feedback!
@anna thank you for sharing. I have not devoured the material, but I just wanted to mention that "reducing to a harder problem" is something we do all the time, even in simple cases like turning a list into a tree or a hashmap.
@slink Thanks for clarifying and for asking the question! :)
Yes, that is true!
Another example would be predicate logic versus propositional logic. Predicate logic allows you to express certain problems a lot more compactly.
However, just because on a high level, our reduction is an example of classical time/space tradeoff, that doesn't make our contribution trivial or uninteresting.
The problem that we study is 25 years old, and there are still papers being published that study it. The problem that we reduce it to is quite esoteric and has so far only been used as a preprocessing step for another problem. I think it's kinda cool that we show that it can be used directly to model and solve real-world combinatorial optimisation problems.
On top of that: the tradeoff is only useful if you have the tools to actually solve the computationally harder problem. Thanks to the enormous progress made by the SAT community in creating SAT solvers that are very fast in practice (like CryptoMiniSAT by @msoos, which we use in our work), we were able to create such a tool.
Therefore, I think that our work also demonstrates that we are making concrete progress towards creating useful tools in the "Beyond NP" realm, and solving the associated problems. I think it would be very cool if we could continue this momentum and identify other such reductions that help us solve concrete problems :)
(Sorry for the TED talk, you caught me at the end of a very long week of endlessly talking about this work 😅 )
Hi fellow academics! I was wondering if y'all can give me some feedback on the poster I am working on for IJCAI (https://ijcai-23.org/)? I'm playing a bit with the design and how to make it attractive.
I'm attaching two screenshots. My questions are about the big eye-catcher in the middle. If you have a minute, can you please let me know what you think?
Do you get the reference?
Does the effort to make the reference distract you?
Do you think that the text in the big pink box has NSFW vibes?
Does the text in the big pink box help to pique your interest in the poster?
@ubi thanks! I guess that’s kind of the point, to have something stand out. If the take home message had been shorter, more to the point, no reference, do you think that that might work better for you?
I misread my colleague's handwriting to say that I should include "brownies" instead of "binaries", and now that I've found out what he actually meant, I am low-key disappointed.
Ik kwam er een paar maanden geleden pas achter dat ik twee oud-oudooms had die in het verzet zaten en zijn gefusilleerd in Kamp Vught: Theo en Herman Mooij. Ze verspreidden verzetsblad Trouw.
Bizar dat ik mijn hele leven nooit bij hen heb stilgestaan tijdens dodenherdenking, omdat ik niet van hen af wist. Ik leerde pas over hen tijdens de uitvaart van mijn oma. Ze waren haar ooms, de broers van mijn overgrootmoeder, die overleed toen ik een tiener was.
Ik ben nu in Californië, en herdenk op afstand mee. Mijn pa maakte de bijgevoegde slide met foto's van Herman en Theo.